We had thought about making a new grappling reticle, so I have a sheet of redesign concepts for that (we ended up just having it change colors depending on what was being grappled to).

We also wanted a way to see the lantern thieves aside from the beams of light, especially since we had so many tall buildings, and it wasn’t uncommon for the beams of light to be occluded by the buildings.  I came up with a design, and tried out a bunch of color variations for it .  The design felt too Halo-y for me, but I had to move onto other tasks :-/

After we had tried and discussed a few other options for conveying damage and Amina’s health, we decided to try some kind of red flash onscreen when hit.  We did have our hesitations with that option as it is so overused by games, but we tried it anyway.  Maybe we could push it more towards blood/dirt/oil getting onto the camera or something…  At first, I just made a blood splatter image  in Illustrator so that we could see kind of what it would look like.  After that got fairly good feedback, I made a more grungy looking image to replace it.  Then in the shader, I was able to give it a dissolving effect when it appeared/disappeared.

This is a flyer I made for the big, joint public playtest we had for our Capstone games.  Members from each team went to UCF one day, and we set our games up in the student union for people to play, test, and give feedback.  We handed these flyers out to get people’s attention.

The smaller image (with the date, time, and place) was the actual flyer.  We cut out the individual games from the larger image and placed them on our tables to label which area was for which game.

I did not create the logos or character art (artists below).  I did, however, assemble the pieces from the different teams, lay them out, and give them some nice backgrounds 😛

Warp Derby: Ryoma Tazi

Pitch Jumper: Jen Melnick and Kyle Prichett

Eshcerreal: Miguel Espinoza and Caitlyn Trout

Grapple: Karen McCarthy

One of the things we wanted to achieve in Grapple was to have a very non-intrusive HUD with minimal, if any, UI (we did have to make some exceptions).  With that said, we needed a way to show players where lantern thieves were in the environment.

Within the game’s fiction, we had talked about the power lanterns giving off a kind of gaseous material or vapor of some sort.  I took that idea and made a particle out of it.  The idea was that the sparkly blue gas would rise into the air, high enough for the player to see, and the player could follow the trail down to find the lantern thief.

A few weeks later, I made another effect to potentially be used for the same purpose.  I made a giant pillar of light that would emanate from the lantern thieves into the sky for players to see.  I included several parameters in the beam’s material, such as tiling, panning speed, and color so that we could have easy control over the look of the beams.

After considering both options, the team decided on the beams of light.  More people liked how they looked, and they were less expensive (since they were just single planes rather than particles).

Once that decision was made, I created two UDK actors in UnrealScript to make it even easier to use and control the beams of light.  One actor was simply a plane with the material assigned.  This allowed us to drag it into the scene already made (rather than having to recreate planes and reassign the material), and it could be spawned, controlled, and destroyed via code.  The second actor housed all of the different parameters in the material plus an XYZ scale for the plane.  Changes made in this actor would affect all instances of the beams of light in the game at once, allowing us to quickly and easily globally affect the look of the beams.

Here are a couple of HUD items I created.  We used the bars for a while to bookend any text appearing on screen (instructions, subtitles, etc.).  The lantern collection bar was a preliminary design for a HUD item that would allow users to see how many power lanterns they had collected.  The lantern model that I used for the silhouette was created by Nisa Martinez.

Here are some renders from a scene in Maya using global illumination.  Nothing fancy, we were just playing around with global illumination and its settings in class, and it turned out some pretty results 😀